I just paid €14,49 for some feature-less text editor…

… and I’m lovin’ it! Writing is hard and distractions are everywhere: twitter, your browser and features, those bloody features. I bet half, maybe even 80% of your word-processing icons and features are unknown to you. You probably only use bold, italic and underline and probably some headings in your text files.

That’s what iA Writer does. It let’s you write.

That’s all it does really, write. No toolbars, no media, no charts, no fonts, no nothing, just a white canvas where you can type on. And by the way, there’s no mouse clicking either. I bet you have to get used to that.

Fullscreen & Focus Mode

Besides that we have a fullscreen mode, true full screen and Focus Mode, something which was introduced in the iPad version of iA Writer. It only highlights the sentence you are currently writing and fades out all other text. I use focus mode 99% of the time while I’m in Writer, it makes writing a lot more productive.

Markdown

iA Writer - Markdown featureThe only tools you’re given is a, to me unknown, feature called markdown. It ables you to:

  • Create headings
  • Create numbered lists
  • Hyphenated lists
  • Starred lists
  • Emphasize text
  • Quotes are also possible
  • Make text stronger

That’s all we need to do some proper writing. I can highly encourage you to buy it, if you want yourself to be productive at writing.

The power of Writer

To illustrate the effect Writer has on my writing: this article took me about 30 minutes to write, in English, a foreign language to me. It’s 1.44 right now, in the middle of the night, and I just felt like writing. iA Writer allows me to do just that.

Promo video

MODX campaigning in the Netherlands

Being at the frontline of the Dutch MODX propaganda machine for a while now, we know it’s hard to get attention for a CMS which is barely known in the Netherlands. We, Sterc, are making some progress now though!

Sterc is MODX Agency PartnerIt’s of the utmost importance to get more users and developers for MODX. We’re trying to get more users by holding talks for our partners and interested clients. Last friday was the first talk at MediaCT’s office, followed shortly by my talk at Traffic Builder’s office. Both companies are well known and highly respected firms in the Netherlands, so this could mean a real good start for our MODX campaign.

Friday Afternoon Session at MediaCT HQ in Groningen

The MediaCT MODX Friday Afternoon Session was streamed live and is also viewable on ustream at this very moment. There were 36 people in total, 18 in the room and 18 online. Slides can be found on Slideshare (Dutch slides).

The FAS keynote was focussed on developers and most questions from the audience were about how implementation was done. The most popular questions was about versioning for the content field, which is currently missing in MODX. Time for a feature request I guess!

Private keynote for Traffic Builders in Almere

The Traffic Builders keynote was private for Traffic Builders (TB) employees and a selection of interested clients. This particular presentation was more end-user and SEO focussed; More focus on TV’s, caching and form customization. All TB’s employees are SEO and/or SEA specialists and I managed to leave some very excited people behind.

Want a MODX introduction at your company or congress?

If you’re interested in MODX and want me to pay your company or congress a visit for a talk, just drop me an e-mail at gp [at] sterc [dot] nl